Both Gilroy and Hall posited the Atlantic Ocean – and the Transatlantic slave trade – as a powerful harbinger of the modern world and as a corrective to narratives of Western modernity as a progressive, Enlightenment project. Such attention to black and diasporic counternarratives also found expression

Related both to Pratt’s characterization and to formulations of world-systems analysis is the rise of Transatlantic studies, which began to insist on dissolving the national or linguistic hold on cultural studies and turned to the examination of movement and interminglings.